J.Biden’s presidential campaign criticized Donald Trump on Tuesday for saying that, if elected, he would close a White House office tasked with ensuring the country is better prepared for the next pandemic.
In an interview with TIME published on Tuesday, Trump said he would disband the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR), opened last summer after Congress passed a bill in 2022 with bipartisan support to mandate its creation. The office recently responded to an outbreak of avian influenza on dairy farms, coordinating with the Food and Drug Administration to ensure that milk remains safe to drink and working with farmers to contain the virus.
Trump described the office to TIME as “a way to distribute pork” and said an effective response to the pandemic could be mobilized as soon as a virus emerged. “I think it looks good politically, but I think it’s a very expensive solution to something that doesn’t work. You have to act quickly when you see this happening,” Trump told TIME.
Biden’s campaign compared Trump’s comments to his haphazard response to the COVID-19 pandemic during his final year in office, when he claimed the virus would disappear “like a miracle” and would “go away without a vaccine” and suggested during a meeting at the White House press conference that the virus could be cured by injecting bleach into patients.
“Pandemic preparedness is not abstract for the millions of Americans who have lost a loved one to Donald Trump’s failed response to COVID-19,” said Kevin Munoz, senior campaign spokesman and former response spokesman. from the White House to COVID-19 during the start of the Biden administration. “We know all too well the impact of Trump’s inability to lead: a crumbling economy, closed schools and too many American lives needlessly lost. We can’t afford to go back.”
After Trump took office in 2017, he dissolved the White House National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense. The Obama administration created this directorate after the 2014 Ebola outbreak exposed how unprepared the US was for an epidemic spreading rapidly from abroad. Without such an office, the Trump White House found itself struggling to coordinate a response after the first signs emerged that the COVID-19 virus was spreading in China. Biden restored that directorate with his first executive order.
In late 2022, Congress, looking to add more resources to prepare for future pandemics, passed the PREVENT Pandemics Act, formally establishing the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy. The office is currently managed by retired Major General Paul Friedrichs. The Biden White House has requested $6.2 million to fund the office in fiscal 2025.
The office keeps Americans prepared for biological threats and pathogens, says Dr. Raj Panjabi, who previously served as Biden’s top NSC official for pandemic preparations. Closing the OPPR “would leave Americans, as happened in 2020, deeply unprepared to respond to a pandemic and risk leading to the same kind of chaotic response we all saw with bodies crammed into trucks that had to be converted.” in morgues in New York City and, ultimately, to a loss of life that is preventable and preventable,” he says.
Trump’s comments, Panjabi adds, “just show that he’s not taking this seriously right now, which is absolutely absurd after more than a million Americans have lost their lives to this.”
Trump also stated in his TIME interview that previous administrations were not better prepared for a pandemic than he was.
“I’m not blaming the previous administrations in any way, because, again, no one saw this coming,” Trump said. “But the cupboards were empty. We didn’t have dresses, we didn’t have masks. We didn’t have glasses, we didn’t have medicines. We didn’t have ventilators.”
It is true that when Trump took office, the US Strategic National Stockpile, an integrated set of secret, federally controlled warehouses filled with medical and protective equipment, was short on supplies. This is because President Barack Obama used resources from reserves for public health emergencies, such as swine flu and the Ebola outbreak. When Obama tried to restock the arsenal, Tea Party Republicans blocked the new financing. In his first three years as President, Trump never attempted to replenish the equipment. This proved to be expensive when the pandemic began. As of April 2020, the US government had already distributed 90 percent of your supplies.
—WITH REPORT BY ERIC CORTELLESSA
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
